Posts Tagged ‘Chartbeat for Everyone’

Here at Chartbeat, we realize you’re super busy and often have a ton of content to comb through, keep an eye on, and generally manage. With this in mind, it’s good to use your time in the Chartbeat dashboard as efficiently as possible. That’s what makes the dashboard module Notable Pages so perfect .

Notable Pages points out key pages you need to be paying attention to right now so you can take action ASAP on these insights.

This module was designed give you interesting facts about your top 20 pages. By checking in with your site every fifteen seconds, Chartbeat is able to accurately track how your audience is interacting with your content in real time.

Notable pages aren’t necessarily your pages with the most concurrents on them. Notable pages signal something interesting and often actionable is happening on a particular page.

Maybe a page has a lot of traffic coming from Twitter. Or perhaps a page has really high Engaged Time. Whatever the fun fact is we’re going to call it out to you!

So now you’re probably wondering, what do I do with Notable Pages? If one of your Notable Pages is getting a lot of visits from an external traffic source that’s linking to the page, this is a perfect opportunity to promote this page on one of your social networks like Twitter or Facebook. Or if this Notable Page has a higher-than-average Engaged Time, it’s worth double-checking the links on that page to make sure you’re encouraging your engaged readers to keep reading on your site after they finish this particular article or post.

If you want more information about Notable Pages head over to our support site. Using Notable Pages in a unique way? Tell me and your fellow Chartbeat brethren all about your mad skills in the Comments.

The world outside your website is tough to manage. You have die-hard fans extolling you in 140 characters. You have newbies who aren’t quite your target stumbling upon you via, er, StumbleUpon. And your regular guys constantly checking up on you through their iPhone apps.

For a long time people have looked at the social audience, in particular, as its own discrete segment living in a vacuum to be treated totally differently from the rest of your audience. But really, they affect your site traffic and engage with your content like everyone else, don’t they? Shouldn’t you know just how much they’re affecting your site? We sure think so.So within the new Social View on your Chartbeat dashboard, you’ll see the whole world of your social visitors. There’s a ton of easy-to-digest information about what’s going on with your site as seen through the social web.

In a single view, you can see what people are saying about you, how many of your current visitors came from social channels, and what pages are powerhouses on social networks.Social traffic can make the difference between an ordinary day and an extraordinary day. It’s important that you can now dig through that list of your most social pages and figure out what makes them different, so you can get the same kind of oomph out of the rest of your pages.If you see a big spike in traffic at the same time as you’re blowing up on Twitter, embrace it – see what people are saying, engage in conversation, retweet. People want to interact with you – make it easy for them to know there’s a real person behind all that HTML…

…and behind all that iOS code.

Your iPhone and iPad app is kind of like an entirely different site. It reaches a potentially totally new audience for you. It’s important to track the differences between your site and your apps.

So, we’re beta testing an iOS app tracking feature, too. If you have an iPhone or iPad app, install away through your dashboard sites page and let us know what you think. (Remember: the key word is “beta,” so we’re looking for your feedback and understanding that it’s not done yet).And don’t forget to sign up for the Chartcorps virtual workshop to get a more in-depth look at social, iOS tracking and everything in between.

We hate to break it to you, but you’re not in a monogamous relationship. Your audience has been seeing other sites.

While your site is amazing at some stuff, it probably needs some TLC in other areas. But which ones? Is your audience ending up with your competitors because their search results are amazing while loving you because you’re killer at social?It’s time you knew how you stack up against sites like you. As part of the Chartbeat network, you’re one of thousands of sites we monitor every day.

Peer Stats

We’ve anonymized (so no one knows your site is compared to theirs and you won’t know exactly who is in your Peer Group either) and aggregated our network of data, filtered it through some intense algorithms and will now be delivering it in context for you in a new feature called Peer Stats.

Peer Stats let you see information about sites that are similar to yours. What does similar mean, you ask? Great question. Right now it’s based on a bunch of stuff like your daily traffic pattern, size of your site, and your industry. This last part we need your help with.The first time you log into your dashboard, we’ll give you a quick survey asking you what kind of site you have, so we can make sure you’re matched up with the right competitors.

Big sites are different from small sites, and your tech blog is different from that guy’s Tumblr with pictures of dogs standing on things. You treat yourselves differently, and so do we.

Notable Pages

In fact, because we know your site is different from all the others, we’ve also given you new ways to learn about your own content. Until now you’ve seen top pages content – only those pages with the most traffic.

Now, we’re introducing Notable Pages, which highlight the most interesting aspects of your site, regardless of the amount of traffic they’re receiving.Say you have a page that’s suddenly getting 99% of all traffic from Social sources. Whoa. Huge. Important to know why that’s the case when the rest of your site is averaging around 20% of its traffic from Social, right? Maybe you can learn from this page and apply those insights across your site immediately.Or there’s a page that’s suddenly surging with new user visits vs. the returning users that it normally gets. You should probably create some new content or related links or the like to make sure you treat these new users carefully to convert them into loyal members.Notable Pages and Peer Stats give you a bit more context to the story of your site. They give you an instant answer to how your site’s doing today.Remember, our Chartcorps team is hosting a weekly virtual workshop for you to get the full rundown of all the new dashboard can do. Sign up!

Engagement: That elusive beast.

Everyone wants it, no one knows just how to pin it down. So we’ve all been stuck with our second choice, the back up, plan B — the page view. Ick.

Who cares that people are loading your page? We need to know how they’re interacting – with what and for how long. As we’ve already ranted and raged about back in January, that’s the only real measure of great content.Well, it’s your lucky day/week/forever, friend. We’ve wooed engagement out of her secret hiding place and pinned her down for all to use.So let’s show off your newest metric Engaged Time:

Engaged Time is dissected in a few ways:

Total amount of time your visitors are have spent actively browsing your site – in human terms: days, weeks, months or years. Not billions of absolutes because, well, what the hell would you do with those massive numbers?

Think about it this way: Total Engaged Time is how long you’ve had your users’ undivided attention today. If 2,000 people have been interacting with your site for an hour each today, that means you’ve had about three months of attention on your site in one day. Three months is how long it takes Mercury to orbit the Sun. Your site engagement being that long is pretty nuts.

Oh, also, since today is Monday, we also let you compare today’s total to Monday last week, the week before, and so on for the past month. You can gauge how your site is doing and see if your sparkly new content is making the difference you’re hoping it does. It shows if you’ve had a good day compared to your usual days.

Average amount of time your visitors are spending on each page. There’s more to understanding a page than just seeing how many people are there – let average engaged minutes help you understand how much they really like it – like, this very second.

Oh, and there’s more! Check out the Content View in your dashboard. See that list of pages? Below each one, you’ll see how many visitors are on that page (like you always could), but now zero in on that nifty little click icon on the right.

That’s the average engaged time for that page – and you can compare and contrast to see which of your pages are doing well at keeping people’s attention.See a page that’s getting a ton of engagement? Click on that.

This is your Page View that has detailed information on its traffic and engagement. Right under your usual traffic timeline, you get a timeline of average engagement over the course of the day. And that number on the right? That’s the total amount of engaged time it’s gotten today.

Now do something about it

You know what everything is, so let’s talk about how you should put it into action.

Picture a page on your site with particularly low traffic. It happens to all of us. But then you notice that this page has ridiculously high engagement compared to your other pages. People are into this page, way into this page. The people who come to it aren’t just bouncing off, but actually sticking around to check out the content you’ve crafted.

A page with high engagement but low traffic

You made this, so give yourself a pat on the back. But then get back to work.

You need to make sure other people see this page too, so send it to everyone you know: put it on Facebook and Twitter, and make sure people notice it on your homepage. Figure out what it is about this page that’s keeping people engaged and apply that genius to the rest of the content.Oh, but you work isn’t done with that one page. Not when you notice something about another one of your pages – that one that you’ve known to have a ton of traffic, so you generally left it alone.

The flip side: high traffic with low engagement

But, now that you have Engaged Time, you see it has really low engagement. So, there’s something about it that’s drawing people in – maybe a good title, an interesting topic, or you got lucky with a link from Reddit. But the low engagement stats are showing you that it just isn’t keeping people’s attention. Is it the writing? Do you need to spice it up? If your traffic is coming from a link, do you need something that’s more interesting to visitors from that other site?

The possibilities to awesome-up your pages are endless. In fact, our Chartcorps team is hosting a weekly virtual workshop for you to get the full rundown of all the new dashboard can do. Sign up!How are you hoping to/already using Engaged Time as the ultimate kick-ass metric?

Introducing Event Stream & Notable Events for Newsbeat

Brace yourself: The right side of your Newsbeat dashboard just got a lot more action. We’ve launched Event Stream, a ticker-like feed of your site’s happenings as they occur. Think of it as “Breaking News: Your Site!” Think of it as ultimate real-time.

With Event Stream, you’ll be able to see the moment when Yahoo News picks you up, so you can raise the flag to the front-lines to prep for the ensuing traffic rush.

And you’ll see when your colleague hits her highest traffic numbers ever, so you can be the first to throw her a high-five across the cubicle wall.

And you’ll see a spike alert the second it happens, so you don’t miss the opportunity to boost that article on social media or create more content to support it or double-check that all those related links are ready to rock.

(How great is that little crown icon? It’s my favorite.)

Basically, you’ll see everything that matters when it matters.And it gets even better.Along with the Event Stream on the right of your dashboard, we’ll incorporate Notable Events into each section of Charts. Notables, in a nutshell, are the best-of-the-best events that we want to be sure you keep track of. So when you look back and see a spike in activity from last week, you’ll remember “Ohhh, right, that was when that Pulitzer-worthy piece on North Korea hit the CNN homepage.”All you need to do is hover over those little gray circles and the Notable’s information will appear.

Our hope is that you use Event Stream and Notable Events to stay on the pulse of all the things that make your site tick. They should keep you even more informed on what important events on your site require you to take instant action.As always, we want to know what you love about this feature and what you want to make sure we keep in mind for future releases. Let us know what you think: support@chartbeat.com.